Travellers’ Tales didn’t take long to work out a formula for their Lego games. Gentle puzzles optimised for co-operative play, a million silly things to interact with, characters as ability gates so their unlocking could reward further exploration over time. All tied to iconic movies, with humour combining the fact that they were all made of lego with a broader taste for the surreal. The baseline was to act out familiar scenes in illogical mime, with inventive visual gags.
They did not keep this up forever. It would be simple to observe that the Lego games started going wrong when the characters started speaking in words. Perhaps, though, that was just a symptom of a wider issue with the topics of the games. In Star Wars, Travellers’ Tales had scored a perfect combination immediately. It worked, it was the single most popular series for video games, there were six movies. Once those had been used up, others were needed. Even as soon as Lego Indiana Jones, it was clear that it wasn’t as good a fit for the formula (wrong tone, not enough characters). Others fitted better or worse. But the supply of movies on that level was finite.
Eventually this would resolve itself in a few different ways. A couple of months before Lego Batman 2 was released, the movie Marvel Avengers Assemble topped the UK box office for three weeks. It would go on to be the third highest-grossing movie of the year, the Marvel Cinematic Universe plan coming together and then some. Months afterwards, Disney would buy Lucasfilm and set a course for a lot more new Star Wars. We were heading to mainstreaming of franchised entertainment on a whole new scale. This would helpfully offer up a regular supply of new films leaning on iconic media, already as nostalgic and self-referential as any Lego game. I will playing quite a few Lego games based on those.
On top of that, by 2015 Traveller’s Tales came up with Lego Dimensions. This was a sprawling thing that cleverly combined both the new trend for shared universes and a trend for collectible toys which you could scan into your games. That concept might as well have been made for Lego games, and it let the developers string together a lot more smaller ideas in a way befitting any random Lego collection. I won’t be playing Lego Dimensions, but I mention it to highlight that Lego Batman 2 actually sits at a weird sort of crossroads for the series.
One of the two films to outperform Avengers Assemble in 2012 was in fact a Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, which was released during the final week of Lego Batman 2‘s five-week run as UK #1. The game is notably not Lego The Dark Knight Rises. Despite having new open-world Gotham sections with some sweeping camera work, neither is it Lego Batman: Arkham City. It would take another decade for a full Lego game to take an existing video game as its starting point. Even aside from any rights issues, Arkham City’s tone was presumably too much of a stretch for something with children prominent in its audience.
Instead, it’s an all-purpose Batman (and Robin) with additional DC characters in a supporting role. You get thrown up against a rogue’s gallery of villains in some familiar locations, building to one of the stronger and sillier ideas of the game in the shape of a Joker mech. Playing as Batman and Robin for large part, the dynamic duo get to swap to various different outfits from their history with individual useful functions, as a substitute for the ensemble casts of Lego Star Wars. It means that if you, say, see your path blocked with fire, it’s rather predictable that you will soon be able to build a station for a suit that can put out fires. As a way of freshening up the familiar gameplay loop it works alright. Elsewhere expanding things is a bit more of a strain – grappling to things offscreen by lining up a cursor with an icon at the top of the visible view never stops feeling awkward.
In place of the kind of specific referential visual humour the series thrived on before, the dialogue adds a fair amount of gentle sending-up. Superman is a bit condescending, The Joker repeats his wisecracks past the point where they made sense. Robin says self-aware things like “I also was… a part of this…”. A ceremony is described as “only the second to be brought to a premature end by a rampaging gang of costumed villains”. None of it grates, but it all feels rather tame and joyless next to some of the series’s previous best moments.
Another bit of retrospective context that illustrates where it falls short is that it came just a year before the creators of Teen Titans Go! took many of the same characters and successfully turned them into an absurdist cartoon sitcom. Next to a team of different eras’ Robins competing to be best Robin, or replacing currency with bees, Lego Batman 2 looks even less imaginative. Travellers’ Tales had started out making Lego games work by showing that they could play it safe and still make things fun and unpredictable. At the point where they had to take more freedom to do what they wanted, they doubled down on safety.
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